Krugman being Krugman

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

"There's the great line, of course, about how his "lived experience" (see? I told you, he's doing empirical work!) confirms that motivated cognition "is not, in fact, symmetric between liberals and conservatives.

...

That Krugman is too thick to see that one can't infer anything about the quality of partisans' reasoning from the truth or falsity of their beliefs is ... another element of Krugman's proof that ideological reasoning is symmetric across right and left!"

Comments

[soliloquy76.livejournal.com]

Too much readin'.

[hardblue.livejournal.com]

Ah, you used the ellipsis for the best part.

<<<<<<<<<<<<

But what comes next is an even more subtle -- and thus an even more spectacular! -- illustration of what it looks like when one's reason is deformed by tribalism:

Yes, liberals are sometimes subject to bouts of wishful thinking. But can anyone point to a liberal equivalent of conservative denial of climate change, or the “unskewing” mania late in the 2012 campaign, or the frantic efforts to deny that Obamacare is in fact covering a lot of previously uninsured Americans?

Uh, no, PK. I mean seriously, no.

The test for motivated cognition is not whether someone gets the "right" answer but how someone assesses evidence.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Your source is agreeing that liberals aren't as whacko as your conservatives, but only that we are not necessarily smarter in our reasoning, but just being with the smarter team.

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

No, Kahan in this case is clearly drawing out the false logic Krugman is using. He's not making any statement about those claims (although I suspect he probably agrees with them deep down).

The humor here is that Krugman is deriding the idea he's writing about by using the exact same concepts that prove him incorrect.

[hardblue.livejournal.com]

Well, we can agree that there is humor in there anyway.

[the-rukh.livejournal.com]

That Kahan guy is kind of fruity. He misses Krugman's point totally than smugly dismisses what he didn't argue. Ok cool, I guess. Also I read up on who he is. Not that impressed with his ideas.

[the-rukh.livejournal.com]

Krugman has a great point there, thanks for bringing it up. Can you point to a liberal equivalent of conservative denial of climate change, or the “unskewing” mania late in the 2012 campaign, or the frantic efforts to deny that Obamacare is in fact covering a lot of previously uninsured Americans?

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

Genetically modified foods, vaccination, the actual skewing mania of one of the chief liberal pollsters (http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114682/ppp-polling-methodology-opaque-flawed), the frantic efforts to claim that the ACA is covering a lot of previously uninsured Americans.

[the-rukh.livejournal.com]

I guess I should have thought better than asking someone in the throes of conservative denialism about the extent of conservative denialism. XD

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

So more people didn't get Medicaid and Medicare coverage after the ACA expanded their scopes?

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

Vaccination? Can you show any evidence that anti-vaxxers are more prevalent in the left-leaning political camp than the right? I'm unaware of any.

[madscience.livejournal.com]

". . . the frantic efforts to claim that the ACA is covering a lot of previously uninsured Americans."

Hey, 2 million is a lot, right? Only 45 million to go!

[dexeron.livejournal.com]

There are all kinds of things we can point out that liberals tend to be "wrong" about more often than conservatives are (GMO, anti-vax, Blackfish, to name a few issues that, in my opinion, liberals tend to consistently take an "incorrect" side on) and acknowledge that political leaning (and often even educational level) is not, in and of itself, a guarantee that someone will be more logical, or more correct, about any specific issue.

But at some point, doesn't the fact that one side tends to be correct more often than not mean that somewhere along the line someone actually is displaying the supposedly elusive logic whose absence Kahan laments? I mean, if one side consistently gets things right, shouldn't we look side-eyed at someone who says: "Well, obviously the incorrect people are using faulty logic, but the correct people are too! They're just lucky. LUCKY ALL OF THE TIME."

[the-rukh.livejournal.com]

Well, Krugman was talking about three things. He acknowledged the study that says that people use data to enforce their pre-held beliefs, but he also went on to point out that they TYPES of beliefs matter and furthermore what people do when they find their beliefs are wrong matter. Liberals are much more likely to acknowledge after the fact that their belief was wrong and work to fix it, a la Obamacare website spectactular failure, while conservatives are much more likely to deny deny deny, a la Iraq war.

The guy who thinks he can respond to Krugman simply ignores all that and makes a claim about how people interpret data then accuses Krugman of being wrong for something he didn't argue. Well, ok then. It's a pretty awful response piece.

[oslo.livejournal.com]

Liberals are much more likely to acknowledge after the fact that their belief was wrong and work to fix it, a la Obamacare website spectactular failure, while conservatives are much more likely to deny deny deny, a la Iraq war.

Kahan's response to this was just to say that it would be nice if we could somehow test an assertion like this for its validity. And lo - indeed, we can, and indeed we have! And it turns out, according to Kahan at least, that the evidence shows that Krugman is in fact wrong to believe that liberals somehow have the better form of "motivated cognition."

I wouldn't take it too personally or seek to spin it one way or the other. Jeff just wants to mock Krugman. You just want to defend your tribe. I think the better approach is to think about the way one assesses new evidence that may count against or support our established political positions. We know that Jeff isn't very good at doing that, nor is he very good at recognizing that he isn't very good at it, and the OP and his comments here are more telling than he realizes. As for you - I suppose I don't yet know, but I'm not optimistic, given your comments here.

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

But at some point, doesn't the fact that one side tends to be correct more often than not mean that somewhere along the line someone actually is displaying the supposedly elusive logic whose absence Kahan laments? I mean, if one side consistently gets things right, shouldn't we look side-eyed at someone who says: "Well, obviously the incorrect people are using faulty logic, but the correct people are too! They're just lucky. LUCKY ALL OF THE TIME."

Yes, but Krugman doesn't appear to be lining up on the conservative side anytime soon. :)

[yes-justice.livejournal.com]

I'd like to see the comparisons between apples and apples. If we are comparing democrats small d to republicans small r, okay. But if we are comparing congressmen to congressmen, well, I think there isn't a congressional anti vax movenment, nor an anti GMO, like there is with climate change and ACA.

[dexeron.livejournal.com]

Exactly. Whatever we might say about beliefs held by some Democrats (or, perhaps better, some liberals,) they are hardly shouting about these beliefs from the halls of Congress, or using them as benchmarks in primary purity tests.

[goumindong.livejournal.com]

That is essentially what Krugman was saying. And Kahan refutes it by saying that small d democrats just listen to the big D democrats. Which is kinda pointless.

For instance I am not a physicist, so i tend to listen to physicists when they say stuff but i will be skeptical of the new things they say if it contradicts my past evidence. This is basically saying that by Kahan's test I would have an ideological bias rather than thinking rationally because I am not evaluating evidence on its merits but rather just going by what established physicists i already know have been saying.

But frankly i should not be evaluating particle physics information. I am not equipped to do so. The question of whether or not I am doing the right thing is not the question of how i update given new information its the question of whether or not the people I trust are trustworthy.

[yes-justice.livejournal.com]

"This proposition is supported by real, honest-to-god empirical evidence -- of the sort collected precisely because no one's personal "lived experience" is a reliable guide to truth."

It is however valid as a data point. Data points are inherently not reliable guides nor are they inherently unreliable guides. They can indeed correlate.

I have no idea why anyone would consider it impossible to be blinded by ideology.

However in the case of climate change, what is the liberal analogue? The Iraq war being a bad idea?

[not-hothead-yet.livejournal.com]

GMOs
vaccinations

[johnny9fingers.livejournal.com]

Ye gods...the irony is, of course, that the "Liberals" are up in arms about collective things: vaccinations being about herd immunity, and GMO's being about feeding the herd.

Honestly... It is possible to be liberal, and conservative (both uncapitalised) at the same time. Change will come: preserve the best, maintain our cultural ties with the past, and accept that things can get better, and ought to.

To me it doesn't seem difficult. What is difficult is filtering the white noise of ideology that surrounds proper information.

[moonshaz.livejournal.com]

"But here's the thing: the lived experience is that this effect is not, in fact, symmetric between liberals and conservatives. Yes, liberals are....."

Liberals are WHAT? Inquiring minds want to know. So I tracked down Paul Krugman's piece (http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/07/asymmetric-stupidity/) shown in the above screen shot and found the following":

"But here’s the thing: the lived experience is that this effect is not, in fact, symmetric between liberals and conservatives. Yes, liberals are sometimes subject to bouts of wishful thinking. But can anyone point to a liberal equivalent of conservative denial of climate change, or the “unskewing” mania late in the 2012 campaign, or the frantic efforts to deny that Obamacare is in fact covering a lot of previously uninsured Americans? I don’t mean liberals taking positions you personally disagree with — I mean examples of overwhelming rejection of something that shouldn’t even be in dispute.

Or look at how liberals reacted to the woes of healthcare.gov. We heard a lot of talk about how it was Obama’s Katrina, or his Iraq. But was there anything like Bush’s “heckuva job” moment — which was matched by widespread insistence on the right that he was actually doing a great job? Was there anything like the years-long denial that anything was going wrong with the Iraq occupation? On the contrary, liberals were quick to acknowledge that the rollout was a disaster, and in fact sort of freaked out — which, as Noam Scheiber says, is what they usually do in the face of setbacks. And what’s more, as Scheiber says, that’s a good thing: faced with setbacks, liberals rush to fix things, rather than denying the problem. Hence the stunning Obamacare comeback.

At this point I could castigate Ezra for his both-sides-do-it article — but instead, let me pose this as a question: why are the two sides so asymmetric? People want to believe what suits their preconceptions, so why the big difference between left and right on the extent to which this desire trumps facts?

One possible answer would be that liberals and conservatives are very different kinds of people — that liberalism goes along with a skeptical, doubting — even self-doubting — frame of mind; “a liberal is someone who won’t take his own side in an argument.”

Another possible answer is that it’s institutional, that liberals don’t have the same kind of monolithic, oligarch-financed network of media organizations and think tanks as the right.

Whatever it is, I think it’s important: people are people, but politics doesn’t seem to have the same stupiditizing effect on left and right."

So. The best part was cut off! Read the whole thing here: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/07/asymmetric-stupidity/

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

Exactly. Reading the whole thing pretty much obviates the OP, unless you want to bring Brenden Nyhan into the conversation.

[oslo.livejournal.com]

Jeff being Jeff. All the hits we've come to know and love:

- Does he screengrab a graph he probably doesn't actually understand, but thinks he does? Yes!

- Does he cite a respectable-looking source that he found only because some other right-wing blog pointed him to it? Yes!

- Does he selectively quote the "juicy" rhetoric from the source, abstracting away its reasoning? Yes!

- Does he display precisely the same kind of cognitive limitations he purports to be mocking? Yes!

[goumindong.livejournal.com]

I am not actually sure that Kahan understands how humans think. He seems to think that it isn't rational to reason along ideological spectrum whereas in truth it is. [i]So long as the ideological spectrum tends to be more right than others[/i].

If confronted with evidence which suggest that their world view is wrong will they take that with the same weight as anyone else? Certainly no, no one does, not even Kahan. Everyone weights by their priors. If your priors are good there is nothing wrong with this. You should be skeptical of evidence which goes against what prior evidence has lead you to believe.

The question is, mainly, whose priors are better? Whose priors are based on evidence and whose priors are degenerate. The answer to that is clear.